'Expletive deleted' too necessary

EDITORIAL

It was a family gathering of some sort - one of those where everyone eats too much. We all settled down to watch a movie - a comedy that someone had recommended as being "hilarious."

Only a few minutes into the show, the response from the family was anything but uproarious laughter.

This particular movie had swear words. A lot of them. The f-bomb was raining down with the same discordant, spine-shuddering sound as if someone had pulled the silverware drawer out too far.

Grandma slowly got up and said, I believe I'll go to my room and read a book. The rest of us simply sat there, shame-faced. We hadn't - but should have - anticipated that the newly released comedy would have a ton of swear words. They all do. But over time, we've become immune to the shock of it. The sounds simply move past our ears like so much wind.

Advertisement

The late comic Lenny Bruce said that if you use a swear word over and over again, it loses its meaning.

So it seems.

The other day I was watching a great movie. It had humor and action. It didn't have gratuitous sex or a single bad word. At last, I thought. A movie we can watch as a family.

Then at the end, the female protagonist drops "the bomb." In fairness, the character, normally an even-tempered young woman with high personal standards, had been pushed to the brink with one setback after another. The screenwriter tried to convey the fact that she was close to the breaking point by injecting the only foul word into the whole story.

But still, it would have been enough to send grandma to her room with a book.

It's become very difficult to find a truly G-rated film or joke these days. My brother-in-law is a dentist and searches fruitlessly for a clean joke to help relax the patients - What did the fish say when he swam into a wall? 'Dam.'

With the children he has to rely on knock-knock jokes.

There's a lot of swearing on television. The really bad stuff they "bleep" over. Like that does any good. The mind naturally tries to fill in the bleep. We know what they are saying. They might as well say it.

Newspaper and television reporters have a particularly tough time of it. They want to quote a source word for word, but what if the source says something unprintable? Then they have to resort to putting "expletive deleted," where the swear word would have gone.

Unfortunately, a lot of perfectly good words have become swear words. A female dog is a bitch. Sometimes you need to smooth something down with a bastard file. The only place you can use those words without raising eyebrows is in a dog pound or a hardware store.

I'm no role model for good language. Just play a couple of holes of golf with me and you'll know what I mean. But I do think we should be able to find movies made by companies other than Disney to watch as a family.